What My Dog Taught Me About Being 50% Happier

Leo is my fluffy white part-Maltese eternal puppy with a light brown patch of heart-shaped fur across his back. He’s going on 16 now, and when he was about a year old he taught me something that I often relive as if it was yesterday.

It was cold, overcast, and early evening. So not a dark and stormy night exactly, but it was unpleasant, made even more unpleasant by the fact that I had been kept late at work for no good reason and Leo was now *really* overdue for a walk. I rushed in the door, was relieved that he hadn’t had an accident, and threw on his plaid Puppia vest, ignoring how cute he looked in it. In fact I was annoyed at his excitement because it took that much longer to wrangle the vest on him. Out on the sidewalk, it was starting to drizzle. Let’s get this f’n walk over with. Things looked and felt really grim.

Literally out of the mist came two big guys, looking like football jocks. One of them practically flopped down in front of us. OMG, your dog! can I pet him? he gushed. Leo basked in their beams, they basked in Leo’s. Fifteen seconds later, the one stood up and announced, Wow, now I’m 50% happier. They went on, talking about whatever they had been talking about.

I was left standing there, stunned. Because why didn’t I let Leo instantly make me happier? Nowadays, my spouse and I live with a menagerie of dogs and cats, Pepe and Chewy who have gone over the rainbow bridge, and Capone, Ziggy, Pablo and Queen Junebug. And their superpower is to make people at least 50% happier, every moment of every day. And we get to make them happy too. That’s a lot of happiness.